‘Did he confide in you?’
‘Sure. Faithful-to-his-wife kinda guy, he felt safe with me. Couple of times he had trouble paying me on time. He was embarrassed, you know? A power situation that was running against him. Scott loosened up some when I explained to him what was happening.’
‘OK, Vita. Good. Did the police take anything away from Scott’s office?’
‘Not unless they’re sleight of hand experts. I watched real close. They just searched through the stuff, kinda uninterestedly. You know the difference between uninterested and disinterested?’
‘I… I think so.’
‘Shoot, then. Say, you’re on expenses, right?’
I nodded, rehearsing my answer to the question.
‘Make sure you get a receipt for the coffees. I’ll have a cappuccino now.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘Let’s hear it.’
I went to the counter and ordered. Her mannerisms and attitude were beginning to annoy me. I sat down and fanned her smoke out of my face. ‘Disinterested means you haven’t got a personal investment in the outcome, uninterested means you don’t give a shit. Do you know where Scott kept his notebook?’
She squashed out her cigarette, pushed the ashtray away and dropped the packet and lighter into her bag. Then she gave me the face-transforming smile again. ‘That’s enough of that for now. Don’t want you to think I’m an addict. I really think we could get along, you know? But you’d have to show a whole lot more confidence in me.’
I was off-balance again. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You’re nice, but slow. I want to help you. I feel guilty, too. I advised him to take the job, for Chrissakes. I fucking sold it to him. I like casinos, did I mention that? No? Well, I have more going on in here than I can get out. I like to dress up in the sequins and silk and throw money away. It’s a buzz. I told him to go for it, and now he’s dead. Dead at thirty-one’s the pits. I’m thirty, how old’re you, Cliff?’
‘Older, where’s this going?’
‘I’m not sure. Where do you want it to go?’
‘Towards finding out why Scott died. I wouldn’t expect to get much further with it than that.’
‘A pragmatist. OK. I can buy that. I don’t know where his notebook is. Hey, have you got a card?’
I decided then that she was seriously unstable, someone to be humoured. I took out a card and put it on the table. She flicked it up with her long, slender fingers and replaced it with one of her own. I hadn’t seen where her card had come from.
‘Thanks. Surprised, huh? Conjuring’s another one of my talents. Take the card.’
I picked it up and put it in my shirt pocket. Despite the fans cooling the heated air in the cafe and keeping it moving, the shirt was sticking to me. I was suddenly aware of a nervous sweating and an urgent need for some alcohol. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Thank you, and I think that’s all I need for now.’
‘You’re full of it,’ she said. She reached out a long, thin, lightly tanned arm and rapped her knuckles on the file folders I’d put on the table. ‘Tell me about these.’
For all the irritation I felt, for some reason I didn’t want to part company with her. I pushed the files across. ‘Preliminary stuff. Do you happen to remember the clients?’
She flipped through the files. ‘Nope. I very rarely saw any. Mostly I just typed up his reports.’
‘I saw them. Terrific typing, better expression than I’d have expected from Scott, too.’
She smiled. ‘Yeah, well, I finessed them a little. Sometimes. He was no John Updike. You read Updike?’
‘I’m not up to date.’
‘The Rabbit books are the great American novel, I’m telling you. Fun name isn’t it-Updike? Hah! Weird you can’t find his notebook. It wasn’t on him when he got shot?’
‘I haven’t checked but I don’t think so. He was in a different job, after all.’
‘Not necessarily. He came in to the office a few times after he got the casino job, and it wasn’t just to pick up mail. He had that redirected I think. Hey, I remember now. He came in one night as I was quitting. I tried to get him to buy me a drink but he wouldn’t.’ She banged the side of her head, quite hard. ‘How could you forget that, dummy?’
‘Was he alone? What did he do?’
She held up a hand and the bracelets slid back over her bony wrist onto her forearm. ‘Hold on. I’m like trying to recall it scene by scene. I was coming out of the building and he was going in. Hurrying. He was carrying something. Papers, no, a folio, something like that.’
‘You didn’t tell the police about this?’
‘I didn’t tell myself. I was tired, plus it was my fasting day. You move into some strange spaces at times like that. It’s only just coming back now.’
‘How did he seem?’
‘I smelled his sweat. He was a clean guy. He was definitely upset. I was flirting with him a bit, the way we did, but he didn’t put anything out. Real cold. I remember thinking that his wife might be around so I glanced at the car… Shit!’
‘Yes?’
She kept her eyes focused on a point somewhere above my head and moved like an automaton, dipping into her bag and coming up with the packet of Kent and the lighter. She lit a cigarette. I moved my head slightly so that the cloud of smoke wouldn’t envelope me. Her head was rigid and she blew the smoke straight at that focus point. ‘I can see him,’ she said. ‘He was sitting in the car. Real still.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. Some guy. Small, dark, maybe. There wasn’t much light’
It was like talking to a medium, trying to get in contact with the dead. Quite unconsciously I spoke in a hushed, sepulchral tone, aware that some of the other patrons were beginning to stare at us. ‘Would you recognise him again?’
‘I sure would!’
The emphatic words seemed to jerk her from the trance. She laughed nervously, drew on the cigarette and missed the ashtray as she tried to flick off the inch of ash. ‘How about that? Vita the woman of mystery-I actually hypnotised myself. First time. You’re a restful man, Cliff, in your uptight way.’
‘When was this, Vita?’
‘It was just two nights before he died.’
6
It was too much to expect that Vita Drewe would be able to give me a description of the man she saw in Scott Galvani’s car. Nothing about her could be that uncomplicated.
‘Not like that,’ she said. ‘I’d know him if I saw him again, but like tell you his height and weight- hey, why aren’t they pronounced the same? Never mind. I mean, a clinical type description? No way. My memory doesn’t work like that.’
I hoped it was her memory that was at issue, not her imagination. We left it there. I paid for the coffee and we walked together back to the office, not saying much. I pointed to my car and she said automobiles were the curse of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We shook hands.
‘My address and number are on the card,’ she said. ‘Don’t be a stranger. So what’s your next move?’
‘Talk to the cops.’
She shrugged and swung her bag on its long strap. I realised how fluidly she moved and how completely unselfconscious she was-probably necessary for white-water rafting and deer-shooting. ‘You’ll be wasting your time.’ There’s a lot of that in this business.’ ‘I noticed.’ She walked away, waving her fingers back at me like Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Very like.
I used my recently acquired, low-budget mobile phone to call the police centre, and was put through to Peter Carboni. From Vita’s account he didn’t sound like one of the ‘best people’ Frank Parker had referred to. It
